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I also liked the game (a lot) and found your post to be quite an interesting view of the game.

I think this game suffered from mediocre reviews mainly because it gave you a city you can roam free in but nothing special to do. I liked this design choice, because it let me explore the world and focus on the main story, without being distracted by collectibles and out-of-context side missions.

I bought the DLCs later and started playing Joe's adventures, but unfortunately they decided to ad timed missions which made the gameplay to stressful and much less fun. So at some point I rage quit and never bothered with it again (there were also "psychic" enemies that you couldn't run away from, since they will always find you and kill you...).

@Kadayi, interesting I knew space was an issue but not to that extent, just thought it was what caused us to get compressed videos etc. It'll be nice when we don't, no matter what you think of FFXIII the quality of it's videos are incredible and it's a shame games like Mass Effect which obviously have nice cgi-y bits are so heavily compressed. I guess RAM is another heavy limitation too, hence the seeing multiple cars in GTA etc.

The RAM aspect certainly plays a big part as well, but that impacts more the amount of diversity you can have on screen at any one time rather than the entire range. Certainly it plays a big part in why pretty much everyone in most games are the same height, build and have the same haircut.

OT, I really enjoy Mafia a lot, feels like they wasted time building the open world though, same as LA Noire.

I think the missed opportunity for both and for a lot of open world games is making them available to other developers to create games within under license. Imagine if Rockstar opened up Liberty City as a virtual environment and Double Fine, Obsidian or Telltale were able to use it as the stage in which to make their own particular brand of game? Seems a shame to create such wonderful environments and then under-utilize them so.

Originally Posted by Lukasz

heh. that is interesting. It is Microsoft fault yet they pass their mistake on devs and on customers. (should have gone with hddvd). we really need to new gen of consoles. with lots of ram and blurays instead of antiqued dvds.

There are pro's and cons to it all. The hardware lock certainly has been beneficial for PC gamer's because it curbed the graphical arms face, however Microsoft deciding to go for a variety of hardware skews and effectively forcing developers to kowtow to the limitations of the weakest link (the core 360) didn't help, and a failure to commit to HD-DVD was a massive mistake in my view firstly because games were already hitting DVD limits at the time, and secondly it pretty much handed Sony the win with Blu-Ray as the High definition format once the PS3 launched and they had a large user base. If every 360 had shipped with HD-DVD as standard that might well have won the format wars because they'd have the numerical advantage. Now of course MS have to pay Sony for Blu-ray.

Originally Posted by Flint

Plus I'm fairly sure one of the motivations for Bioware not caring about the single-disc limit with ME3 are the issues they encountered trying to stay within one disc limit for ME2 (all characters recruitable in any order right from the start turned into three-character 'chapters', etc).

Originally Posted by Woundedbum

Mass Effect 2 is on 2 discs though.

Indeed. Bioware were responding to criticisms with the first game in terms of repeat environments (the bases were all the same) and the slow transition between locations, etc but in order to do the 2 disc thing they had to compartmentalize the narrative, thus why the splint in the team selection.